P-Station: Retro game station

P-Station is a Raspberry Pi-powered game station.
It's based on the RetroPie distribution which allows you to turn
your Raspberry Pi or PC into a retro-gaming machine.

P-Station can be hooked up to a TV for video and sound using the HDMI connector at the back. It also has 3 USB connectors: one supplies power, the other two can be used for USB drives, keyboards etc. Finally, for convenience, it also has an RJ45 socket so I can plug into my home netwerk.

Pictures of the finished article

RGL: Retro Game Launcher

Rather than using EmulationStation which comes with RetroPie, I've developed my own application to browse through game lists and launch them: Retro Game Launcher. It can support all of the emulators & ports supported by RetroPie, so far I've configured P-Station to support MAME & GBA games and the Doom & Wolfenstein ports.

This is a video of P-Station starting up, browsing through the game lists in RGL, playing pacman and then shutting down.

You need to buy a decent power supply. I noticed that most 2A/5V adapters work fine when hooked
up directly to the Raspberry Pi. However, once connected indirectly via one of P-Station's back-panel USB
connector, voltage regularly drops to below 4.65V. When that happens you'll see a rainbow-colored square on
screen and the Raspberry Pi starts running at half-speed.
The one I bought is actually a 2A/5.2V adapter.

Cables

I've used standard HDMI, USB and netwerk cables to connect P-Station's back-panel connectors to the according connectors
on the Raspberry Pi. Said that, I did shop around looking for 30cm or 50cm cables.